Tracking the musings of joshp

November 24, 2003

Excuse the navel gazing, but it is a funny side effect of the recent excitement that "15 MB of Fame" has seen its PageRank soar in recent weeks, leading to some funny top results and an illustration of the power law involved with query traffic and the behaviour of PageRank.

November 19, 2003

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversy have done some of the leading research on people's inability to accurately estimate objective probabilities. I love how people like to argue about the answers to math. It seems like probability problems are one of the few areas where folks are willing to trust their instincts so strongly in making the case against the "right" answer. In another study, cited in Deborah Bennet's Randomness, the reason for this is thought to be people's willingness to ignore or fail to grasp the importance of base-rate information because it is "remote, pallid and abstract", while target information is "vivid, pressing, and concrete". An example from Kahneman and Tversky is the following problem:

A cab was involved in a hit and run accident at night. Two cab companies, the Green and the Blue, operate in the city. You are given the following data:

(a) 85% of the cabs in the city are Green and 15% are Blue.
(b) A witness identified the cab as Blue. The court tested the reliability of the witness under the same circumstances that existed on the night of the accident and concluded that the witness correctly identified each one of the two colors 80% of the time and failed 20% of the time.

What is the probability that the cab involved in the accident was Blue rather than Green?

What I love about this isn't that it is so hard to solve. What I love is that I had two very bright people in my office arguing passionately for two different answers and both believed they were right even after seeing how to solve the problem.

Microsoft has started testing an international news search service in competition with Google's, upping the ante in the hotly contested Web search market.

Microsoft Web portal MSN has unveiled a test, or beta, service called MSN Newsbot to search news in the languages of four countries--the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain. MSN Newsbot is an experimental, automated news service that gathers news from more than 4,000 sources online, according to the Newsbot Web site.

But unlike rival periodical searches on the Web, Microsoft said that the service is designed to deliver personalized news to visitors, using tracking technology and consumer data from users of Passport, Microsoft's e-wallet system.

. . .

MSN Newsbot targets Google in an area that Microsoft believes can be improved through technology and in which its established relationships with Web surfers may give it an advantage.

To deliver the test service, the company in March hired Joshua Petersen, a former executive at Amazon.com who was integral to growing the online retailer's business from the use of its recommendation engine. Petersen is now leading MSN's initiative to customize news for users of Passport and general Web surfers.

November 10, 2003

1. You are at the park, pushing your daughter on a swing. You meet a woman and start a conversation. She says she has two children. You ask if she has any girls. What is the chance that at least one child is a girl?

Replay with slight change

2. You are at the park, pushing your daughter on a swing. You meet a woman with her daughter and start a conversation. She says she has two children. What is the chance that both children are girls?

Rewind, again

3. You are at the park, pushing your daughter on a swing. You meet a woman and start a conversation. She says she has two children. You ask if she has any girls. She says yes. What is the chance that both children are girls?

Now this is pretty low level stuff, but that is what I think is so interesting. Its like sleight of hand slowed down. Makes me wonder what is going on metaphysically as the new information arrives? Is that what information does to the world -- changes the likelihood of outcomes?

November 07, 2003

Could this really be Plaxo's super secret business model? If so, I know the Planet All folks that built the vehicle 7 years ago, as well as the struggling nanowrimo author who prototyped the next great internet idea. This innovation stuff is easier than it looks.

Bloglines is a server side RSS reader, index of RSS feeds, and blogroll system -- with promises of recommendations. Blogrunner is a news and blog citation index with cross-links between the two (with UI design that makes technorati look nice). Both of these have 1/4 of a good idea, I think.

This post from on Mr Udell's blog gets at the same idea behind the next version of politicalthought.com. Of course, its probably only weeks until Google releases the "search inside this white paper" system with link analysis based reputation management for scholars. Especially since they've hired Steve Lawrence, the creator of Citeseer.